Harare, Zimbabwe (CNN) -- Vote-counting in Zimbabwe's hotly contested election began late Wednesday with President Robert Mugabe and main challenger Morgan Tsvangirai confident of victory. Partial results were expected to come out early Thursday, said Rita Makarau, chairwoman of the Zimbabwe Election Commission, which has until Monday to release full results. Five presidential candidates are in the race including Mugabe and Tsvangirai, the current prime minister. Makarau dismissed allegations from Tsvangirai's party that the election commission rigged the polls for Mugabe. "I believe that the election is free and fair," she told journalists. "Maybe the reports that will come out will vindicate my view of the election as free and fair."


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Mugabe and his main opponent voted at different polling stations in Harare.


A great deal of Americans were justifiably upset when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the election. But rather than using social media to express their frustration and disappointment in an elegant way, many Twitter users instead used the platform to post shockingly racist tweets, calling President Obama a ‘n*****’ and a ‘monkey.’ A map collected by Floating Sheep, a collective of geography academics, shows the shocking demographic of racist 'hate tweets,' many of them collected from states that were won by Romney. Vitriol: Floating Sheep mapped out racist tweets about Obama across the country, starting on November 1; Arkansas and Mississippi had the highest concentration of such tweets

Riots: Ole Miss students took to the streets, burning
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Obama campaign posters after his reelection was announced


Aleppo, Syria (CNN) -- Somehow, the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who can't -- or won't -- leave this battleground city have grown accustomed to living in a state of war. But they have also shown that they do not want to live in a state of anarchy. Read more: Morsy backs Syrian calls for al-Assad to face war crimes trial On a side street, not far from where goats graze next to a burned-out ambulance in what used to be a neighborhood park, stand the offices of what can only be described as a rebel court. The United Courts Council operates without the authority or recognition of any central government. It stands on the opposition-held side of the front lines that divide this city.

Yet at first glance, inmates there appeared to be treated better than at another makeshift rebel jail CNN visited in northern
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Syria last August.